Austin Powers could become the latest musical to save Broadway

Broadway—that moldering assemblage of music halls that entertained the laudanum-addled audiences of yesteryear, who were looking to escape plague-stricken rats for a few hours—has at last found its footing as a place where recent popular movies are reborn as song-and-dance-and-commemorative-sweatshirt spectacles, after years of wasting everyone’s time with original characters and storylines. The latest movie-to-musical adaptation that is justifying all that quaint “legitimate theater” our grandparents had to put up as an alternative to dying in the streets: Austin Powers, the spy spoof that lives on in the catchphrases and Halloween costumes of men that you work strenuously to avoid in the company break room, and which is now being adapted for the stage by Mike Myers, according to the Post. Myers will reportedly be “heavily involved” in writing what would be an “all-singing, all-dancing” reimagining, though he will not star. (“Even though he has quite a good singing voice,” the article adds, suggesting their unnamed “source” is Myers himself, or his mother.)

Rumors surfaced, again, this past summer that Myers had signed a deal to develop a fourth Austin Powers film that he is supposedly currently writing, though there hasn’t been any further Austin Powers-related news since then that didn’t involve horrific acts of sexual abuse and/or murder. Supposedly Myers will be writing this musical concurrently, should the deal go through to have Austin Powers officially join all the other film-to-stage adaptations of late—including, again, The Goonies, Big Fish, Newsies, the Kevin Kline comedy Dave, Rocky, Ghost, a new version of Carrie, Once, Predator, Moon Over Parador, the Brian “Boz” Bosworth actioner Stone Cold, Jack And Jill, etc., only some of which we totally made up. “Oh behave,” New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote sarcastically in a blank Word document, then set it aside to fill in later.